Altona’s Tyler Pelke refused to die at the hands of a madman and he will never surrender to the scars ...

Tyler Pelke

Members of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers visit the recuperating Tyler Pelke (C) with Grey Cup in a mid-1990s family photo. Pelke was severely burned in a fire and a friend was killed following a criminal incident in Altona, Manitoba, south of Winnipeg. Courtesy of Pelke family

Courtesy of Pelke family/QMI Agency

A fire scene shows a damaged house in Altona, Manitoba in a mid 1990's photo provided by the Pelke family.
Tyler Pelke was severely burned in a fire and a friend was killed following a criminal incident. Pelke is now a Calgary Deputy Fire Chief. Courtesy of Pelke family

Fire-boiled scars cover his chest, while a thick one stretches across Tyler Pelke’s throat, screeching to a stop within a dime’s width of major blood vessels.

Others crawl along his chin and, when the 37-year-old rolls up his sleeve, there are etchings on his arms where doctors did grafting, pinning his skin down with hundreds of staples.

Obvious reminders paying permanent testament to a death-defying ordeal more than two decades ago — several hours that began with Pelke and his high school friend being terrorized and ending with only one of them walking out of a burning house.

The scars exist, visible and invisible, but Pelke refuses to let them define him.

Quite simply, he is no longer anyone’s victim.

“When I do notice them, it’s a reminder of what I have overcome or gone through — I’ve been through fire,” says Pelke, a former Altonan and current assistant deputy chief with the Calgary Fire department.

“Some days, it’s a reminder to be thankful.

“Some days, I don’t even see them.”

The new kid in town, it wasn’t long before the 14-year-old found a kindred spirit after moving to Altona, Man., in 1990.

Curtis Klassen and Pelke were goalies on the same hockey team and even had the same ‘Pokey’ nickname.

“He was a warm, caring kid everyone loved,” Pelke says.

“He was a big, goofy kid who made everyone feel good about themselves.”

Weeks later, 15-year-old Klassen would be dead.

And Pelke — sexually assaulted by the same teen before his throat was slashed and he was set on fire — would be clinging to life after stumbling out of the deadly inferno that was his home.

Albeit a long and gruelling recovery, he was afforded a second chance his friend was deprived.

It would be years before Pelke learned to “forgive himself for being alive” when Klassen was not.

“We both wanted to be professional hockey players,” he says when asked what Klassen might have done with his life if it wasn’t stolen.

“The still sobering piece is — Curtis isn’t around — every milestone in life I have, he doesn’t.”

Many might not share such painful memories and few would blame them.

But not Pelke.

He has told his story countless times to church groups, youths, burn survivors (many who he met as a burn camp counsellor), emergency workers and at events as a motivational speaker.

And learning how he went from being at the mercy of a monster to reaching a place where he harbours no hatred nor anger, it is not tough to see why reliving his story is worth it to offer context for his message.

Although easier said than done, it is a simple one.

“If you don’t make peace with your past, it affects your future ... the lens you look at life through,” Pelke says.

“It is part of you. You learn from it, you grow from it and you continue to move on.”

Watching him do that has made his mother, Robin Doerksen, proud.

“There were times when he was the parent and I was the child,” she says.

“He’s gone forward in leaps and bounds. Watching your child come from where he was on that deathbed ... that is inspiring.

“He has made a great life for himself.”

Around town, 17-year-old Earl Giesbrecht had a reputation for being dark and menacing — a troubled youth some even labelled a sociopath.

On Nov. 17, 1990, all the scuttlebutt went from fear-mongering to fact when Pelke and Klassen were trapped in the teen’s violent vortex.

After going to a school dance, the friends were at Pelke’s house watching The Hunt for Red October when there was a knock on the door.

Giesbrecht was dressed in black and carrying a duffle bag, the unsuspecting teens literally opening the door to a killer.

Initially, there was no hint of the horror to come, Giesbrecht telling the pair he had been doing break-ins, pulling a .357 magnum out of the bag as evidence.

“I was too naive to put two and two together,” says Pelke.

With a hockey tournament ahead in just a few hours, Pelke subtly suggested it might be time for Giesbrecht to leave.

But the strange visit took a sinister turn with the gun-wielding teen ordering Pelke to bind Klassen’s hands with hockey tape before taking the terrified teen to another bedroom.

“Then he did the same to me,” Pelke says.

“That was the last time I saw Curt.”

Fourteen years flashed before him in the split-second it took for the blanket covering him to ignite.

Moments earlier, Pelke believed they would be set free.

“He told me to kneel down and turn around to cut the tape off my hands,” recalls Pelke, whose vision was also mostly obscured by tape over his eyes.

“Then he told me he killed Curt and he pulled my head back and cut my throat.”

Pelke played dead but the sadist on a mission wasn’t convinced.

As the fire was lit, all hope was extinguished.

“He put a quilt over top of me and doused it with what smelled like kerosene,” Pelke says.

“I guessed ‘This is it, this is how I’m going to die ... I’m being burned alive.’ ”

He panicked, he prayed and he gave up until “a voice” told him to “get up and go.”

Heeding that voice would be the first and most crucial of many steps Pelke would take to escape the clutches of his tormentor.

He arrived with blood pouring from his throat, his hands taped behind his back and burns to about 25% of his body.

It was, Pelke recalls with a smile, the first time he and his neighbours would meet.

A man opening the door momentarily looked past him to a shadow nearby in the darkness, someone smoking a cigarette.

Finally, Pelke felt safe.

“Any time I would try to talk, it was just air coming out,” he says.

The man cut the tape from Pelke’s hands, put a towel around his neck and then gave him a pen and paper — the teen writing about his friend left to die in the burning home and the name of the monster responsible for it all.

Convicted of first-degree murder, Giesbrecht was handed a life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.

“I was scared,” Pelke says of seeing him in court.

“I was 14 and someone tried to kill me.”

More than a decade later, Pelke, would be face-to-face with his would-be killer, the man who killed his friend, the man who stood smoking in the dark shadows outside that murder scene.

But this time, he wasn’t scared.

“He was more nervous than me, sweat was running off his head,” he says, recalling the meeting at Drumheller Institution.

“I felt quite at peace. I forgave him and told him I didn’t fear him.”

Giesbrecht — who claimed he was sexually assaulted as a child, bullied for being gay as a teen and saw Klassen and Pelke as representing those who mistreated him — “accepted responsibility.

“But forgiveness is not absolution,” Pelke later told a parole board. “Curtis does not come back to life because Earl has been forgiven any more than the scars on my throat and chest disappear.”

Pelke, like his mother, believes life in prison should be life in prison.

Last summer, the Parole Board of Canada granted Giesbrecht — who declined to be interviewed by QMI Agency— unescorted temporary absences.

He could be crippled by his past, plagued by pain, harbouring hatred. And few would blame him.

But Pelke will not to be imprisoned by his past.

“I believe miracles can happen,” he says.

“Faith and forgiveness is where I get strength.”

Powerless in the face of tragedy, he was and is not in its aftermath.

“So many bad things happen in the world. It’s how you responded,” says Pelke who long ago relinquished the role of victim.

“A victim, to me, is a dead person, physically dead, spiritually or mentally dead. There is a point where you are a victim — a burn survivor or a cancer survivor, a survivor who walked through a journey — there are times when you need help, but you need to move on.

“Look at Nelson Mandela, if he chose to live there, what impact would he have had? You can be a victim but everybody has a choice.”

Pelke chooses not to let what happened haunt him but, in spite of it, to be the best person he can be — part of that includes sharing his story in the hopes it might help others reach their full potential, despite whatever obstacles they face.

“Your experiences make you who you are, I’m not used to failing.

“There’s the mountain, how do you climb it?,” he says.

“I am who I am, not what happened to me.

“I don’t have it all figured out but I try to do it right every day and leave people better than when I found them.”

Altona’s Tyler Pelke refused to die at the hands of a madman and he will never surrender to the scars ...

Fire-boiled scars cover his chest, while a thick one stretches across Tyler Pelke’s throat, screeching to a stop within a dime’s width of major blood vessels.

Others crawl along his chin and, when the 37-year-old rolls up his sleeve, there are etchings on his arms where doctors did grafting, pinning his skin down with hundreds of staples.

Obvious reminders paying permanent testament to a death-defying ordeal more than two decades ago — several hours that began with Pelke and his high school friend being terrorized and ending with only one of them walking out of a burning house.

The scars exist, visible and invisible, but Pelke refuses to let them define him.